Today, it is known that surgeons and surgical staff use checklists when performing a surgical procedure. However, surgical procedures are currently limited to manual and static checklists whereby a surgeon or head of a hospital develops a surgical checklist before beginning the surgery and a hospital surgeon or nurse is responsible for following the checklist during the surgical procedure to ensure that all steps in the surgical procedure are performed on a patient.
This is disadvantageous as patient safety is controlled by a human (i.e. hospital surgeon or nurse tracking the procedure) and steps in the surgical procedure can be missed as human error can occur when coordinating the steps of the surgical procedure. Moreover, the manual and static checklists are unevenly applied in similar surgical procedures, and manual and static checklists are non-engaging to the human staff involved in a surgical procedure.
In addition, the manual and static checklists hinder communication within the operating room as gaps in readily available clinical information exist, and there is an implied hierarchy between, the surgeon, anesthesiologist and nursing staff, which results in poor coordination and efforts through manual checklists.
It is thus desirable to avoid complications in surgical procedures due to manual checklists. Avoiding surgical errors will result in significant improvement in patient satisfaction, referrals, improved perception of clinical administration by operating room (“OR”) staff, reduction of unnecessary fees, and costly litigation. It is believed that half of surgical complications today are avoidable through improved communication and by further automating surgical procedures.
Thus, there exists a need to provide a method and system whereby automated checklists are provided to improve surgical procedures. It is desirable to provide a method and system having checklists that are updated based upon clinical information. It is desirable to provide checklists that are dynamic, so that the checklists and steps in the checklists can be updated during a surgical procedure.